Will's Miro dev blog

I spent the week working on:

• Firefox patches for 303645, 400061, and 400064
• Fixing build issues with Miro 1.1.1 on Gutsy (i386 and amd64), Feisty and Dapper
• Mediabar specs and revival
• Some minor bug triaging
• Bug 9150: implementing feed:// and feeds:// support at the command line

This coming week I’m:

• Working on Mediabar specs and revival
• Any post-landing Firefox patch work
• Working on bugs 9523, 9521 and 5403
• Getting a Mac-mini for Boston devs for testing/development
• Visiting the Worcester office on Thursday, February 7th

It’s been a good week overall. The Firefox 3 B3 codefreeze is tonight and I think I’m on track for landing all three patches, but they haven’t landed yet (as of this writing). We’ll see what happens tonight.

Update: All three patches landed. The one for 400061 had some issues, but myk fixed them and landed it for me.

I put out Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper builds for i386 for Miro 1.1.1 on Tuesday when we did the Miro 1.1.1 release. But… I’m using new scripts and I goofed up the miro-data package. I didn’t have time to figure out the problem, so I attempted to back out the Gutsy amd64 packages and in the process screwed up something else.

I thought I had it all working by Tuesday night, but there were a couple of users that were still experiencing “size mismatch” errors on the miro-data package. So I took some time today to figure out how to deal with the miro-data package I was building, roll up a set of Miro 1.1.1-3 packages for Gutsy i386 and amd64 and push everything out.

Theoretically there should be good Gutsy i386 and amd64 packages for Miro 1.1.1 in addition to the Feisty and Dapper i386 packages I rolled out Tuesday.

Sorry for the delays. I think things are straightened out now. If you’re still having problems feel free to leave a comment below and/or find me on IRC or by email.

Things I did this week:

• Visited the Worcestor office on Thursday.
• Cut a 1.1.1 rc1 release.
• Cut a 1.1.1 final release.
• Built Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper packages for 1.1.1… then spent half a day dealing with repository issues resulting from Gutsy i386 miro-data package being slightly different in some way than the Gutsy AMD64 miro-data package. I haven’t figured out the problem here. I’ll try to do it this week. I suspect foul play. Probably my fault. If you’re having problems with Gutsy, Feisty or Dapper packaging for Miro from the PCF repository, let me know.
• Pulled an all-nighter Friday night working on and finishing up patches for 400061 and 400064. Then spent several days talking with Mozilla folks, fixing the patches based on reviews and generally trying to get as much done as possible to increase the chances of these patches making it into Firefox 3.

Things I plan to do this week:

• Continue pushing the patches for 303645, 400061 and 400064 until they’re landed.
• Figure out what the problem with building the miro-data package is.
• Figure out what to do about a new laptop. I’m currently looking at the Dell 1420N and System76 laptops. Any thoughts on Ubuntu-based laptops would be hugely useful.
• Try to avoid getting involved in anyone else’s work until the patches for Firefox are out of my hands.
• Spending some time with my wife before she forgets who I am.

I haven’t put Dapper and Feisty builds for Miro 1.1 into the repository yet. The Gutsy builds are there, but there are some issues with segfaulting when watching videos with them. I’ve only heard about Gutsy segfaulting with Miro 1.1 from one person and there aren’t any new bugs for the issue. From that I’m guessing the issue is pretty limited user-wise, but don’t really have a good way to measure.

The last few days went like this. We did a Miro 1.1 release on Thursday and I started building Ubuntu builds for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy that afternoon using the new pbuilder-based scripts I’ve been working on. The pbuilder-based scripts are great in that I can automate building packages for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy for i686 on a single machine (no longer need VMs) and they verify the build-depends lines in the .dsc files. That’ll make building from source possible.

The problem with Miro 1.1 is that the switch from BitTorrent code to libtorrent code causes compiling to take longer. Additionally, the pbuilder-based scripts pull down all the dependencies and build the environment to do the build in for each distribution and that takes a while, too.

When working on builds, I had problems with the Dapper and Feisty builds segfaulting when playing videos during testing. I first blamed the new build scripts. I spent 8 hours or so fiddling with them, verifying all the build steps, and eventually running them in the distribution VMs I had. On Saturday, I decided that theory wasn’t a good one.

I tried a few other things and then started bisecting the svn changes since Miro 1.0 in my Feisty VM to see if I could find the checkin that caused the problem. After a few more hours, I discovered that it was a change to xine_impl.c that I made for bug 9373 that causes the segfaults when viewing videos. Another hour later and I verified this is the same problem with the Dapper build.

I backed out that change and re-ran and re-tested everything.

In summary, the pbuilder-based scripts are fine and backing out that xine_impl.c fix fixes the issues I was seeing.

We’re working on a Miro 1.1.1 release that has some changes that allow for co-branding. We decided to push these changes off to 1.1.1 so that we could release Miro 1.1 a week earlier. I decided that I’d skip builds for Feisty and Dapper for Miro 1.1 and instead do builds when we released Miro 1.1.1 this week. That should happen in the next day or so.

I really apologize for the current situation. It was a confluence of several circumstances that led to me taking a long time to figuring out the cause of the problem which sucked.

I should have 1.1.1 builds of Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper out by Friday night if not sooner.

It was a really busy week–I essentially worked for the last 7 days straight. It’s been a good/bad week for me. I:

• pushed out the Miro 1.1 release on Thursday which had some minor release-engineering issues (I forgot the symlinks for Miro.dmg, the appserial number is 20080101000 but should have been 20080110000, and Feisty and Dapper won’t build)
• I updated the instructions for releases in the wikis which improves the release process going forward
• I spent Thursday night, Friday and most of Saturday investigating the segfaults with the Dapper and Feisty packages and traced it down to the fix for bug 9373
• I backed out the fix for bug 9373–I’ll release Feisty and Dapper packages when we “release” Miro 1.1.1
• I worked on the Firefox patch work for bug 400061
• I made some more changes to the patch for bug 303645, it was reviewed, and it looks like it’s on its way to Firefox 3 (assuming all goes well)

I’m going to spend the next week:

• aiding Paul with the Miro 1.1.1 release
• continuing the work on bug 400061 and friends

Other projects are publishing their Bugzilla stats, so I took 30 minutes and threw together a script to run some numbers against our Bugzilla instance.

Two things to keep in mind when looking at these numbers:

1. We migrated our bugs from Trac to Bugzilla in mid-August. Trac wasn’t working out for us and we’ve got a lot of crufty bug data still hanging around since then.
2. The numbers are slices of data. They can indicate things, but there’s a lot of context that they don’t take into account. So it’s good to be careful about drawing conclusions based solely on the numbers reported.

Stats for the year: 2007

BUG STATS
=========

Total bugs created: 4052
      41 - Miro Mediabar
       3 - getmiro.com
      35 - Broadcast Machine
    3809 - Miro
     164 - Miroguide

Bug activity:
     736 - FIXED
     170 - INVALID
      35 - WONTFIX
     139 - DUPLICATE
     169 - WORKSFORME
       0 - MOVED
       0 - NEEDSINFO

    4052 - CREATED
   13564 - COMMENTS

USER STATS
==========

Users created: 645

Top 7 bug reporters:
    3172 - Janet
     138 - Dean Jansen
     102 - Nicholas Reville
      52 - Nick Nassar
      47 - sg
      35 - Fluteman
      28 - Ben Dean-Kawamura

Top 7 bug commenters:
   10354 - Janet
     331 - Nick Nassar
     315 - Will Guaraldi
     312 - Ben Dean-Kawamura
     286 - Luc Heinrich
     259 - Dean Jansen
     217 - Paul Swartz

There are a few things I want to point out.

First, is that we’ve got 645 new Bugzilla users since mid-August. That’s really great!

Second, is that Janet is not a machine that generates 10 bugs and 30 comments every day. What’s going on is that I tied her Bugzilla userid to all the bugs I migrated from Trac for which I had no userid to tie to.

Third, sg and Fluteman are really fantastic. The work they’re doing is making a huge difference in the direction and quality of Miro. Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who’s helped out in 2007. I hope the numbers for 2008 are doubly-impressive.

I spent the last week:

• fixing some bugs (9373, 8138, 9383, 9372, 9414)
• doing some bug triage
• reworking the Ubuntu packaging scripts to use pbuilder (much easier to build packages and pbuilder verifies the build-depends)
• added a NEEDSINFO resolution to Bugzilla
• tweaked some stuff so we can tag with names like Miro-x.y instead of Democracy-Player-x.y
• mothered through Miro 1.1 rc0 and rc1

I’ll be spending this week:

• finishing up the Miro 1.1 release
• finishing up the Miro 1.1.1 release (with turbo co-branding ass-kicking action)
• working on Mediabar
• fixing some more bugs

Sedatg pointed out the archos-sync project. It’s a script that syncs the content between his Archos media player and Miro. More information at that link.

If anyone was interested in helping out on a syncing project to sync Miro content with devices, that’s probably a good one to help out with.

Anyone else know of similar projects that are building software to sync Miro content, convert content or port Miro to smaller devices? If so, please add a comment. The more exposure to these projects, the better.

I wasn’t around for the last week. I got home last night and spent today recovering from some flu I’ve been fighting for the last week and also continuing work with building a pbuilder environment for Gutsy and friends.

Tomorrow I plan on finishing up the pbuilder stuff and working on the Firefox patches, but … I don’t think I have much of a chance of finishing them in time, so I think I may put it on the backburner and help out with Miro 1.1 and continuing development. Then work on the Firefox patches for 3.1.

Happy New Year!